Ravenous (Taint of the Gods #1)

60. RHYDIAN

60

RHYDIAN

I t was fast, the speed with which I was able to locate the most recent memory. That thread was always the brightest. Scarlet instead of crimson. Static instead of pulsing. The sign it is a memory preserved and not alive.

I take hold of it and find myself standing where I had just been. In the temple.

In the doorway, open to the night air, wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she had attacked me that first day on the train, was Rieka, an expression of divine fury on her face.

My grandfather sat at the further most point of the room, sitting on one of the benches instead of on the floor against the wall. Beside him, shielding most of him from my sight, with an expression that was entirely devoid of emotion, was Ghena.

Her little wrist was at his lips.

My own thoughts threatened to invade the dream at the realisation of what I was seeing, forcing me to shield myself.

“Release her!” Rieka said, and I felt like this was the second time she had given that order.

My grandfather dropped the young girl’s hand like she were a rag doll. “Leave. Now,” was the only command he gave.

He pulled his blue neckerchief from his pocket and wiped his lips as Ghena passed by Rieka and out of the building without a word. The memory told me he was annoyed. She could have interrupted him during a winning hand of cards, and he still wouldn't have been as irritated with her as he was in this moment.

“You need to turn yourself in Kosha.”

He scoffed. In twenty-four years I’d never heard my grandfather scoff even once. He straightened on the bench, staring down at his cane handle in his lap.

“When did you realise?” he asked as he cleaned the tip of the bone blade with the handkerchief and then placed it back into the cane, carefully placing it on the bench beside him, its purpose complete.

“I had my suspicions,” Rieka answered, her tone oddly casual. “But it was the sweet limes that eventually gave you away. The Servitors used to make me soak in them. You used them to cover the scent of blood.’’

“That’s an awfully big presumption.”

“Well you’re keeping an awfully big secret.”

He cocked his head slightly as he answered. “One does what one must.”

“You are a predator,” she said, her words quick and to the point.

“I am a survivor. I have always been a survivor.”

“Survivors do not use the blood of children to prolong their lives.” Beyond the memory, in the physical world, I felt my stomach drop at her words.

“Viper’s poisons are particularly vicious wouldn’t you say.” My grandfather stood and stared out the window into the night, his countenance not at all that of a man who had just been accused of a heinous crime. “You were lucky when you got attacked. Rhydian retrieving that venom sack likely saved your life. I wasn’t so lucky. The one that attacked me all those years ago caused abscesses to grow on my internal organs that burst from time to time. And since I had been so skilled in dispatching it before realising the damage it had caused me—well, you can understand that obtaining an antidote is next to impossible without a body. So I turned to the next best thing.”

Her voice entered his head as though she couldn’t say the word aloud. “Blood. ”

“Indeed. Our ancestors used to use it to hide their Hemopath status. Metabolise the blood of other Devolved Humans and one can parade around as a Current or a Kindling and after dipping into their brains a little, no one is the wiser. I simply used it for more practical reasons.”

“You killed children!”

“Who would have died anyway give or take a few years. Better the known death than the violent one.” His tone was so nonchalant, it could have been talking about the weather.

“Why children?”

He shrugged. “Because their minds last longer under excessive bloodwork. Fiddle with an adult mind too often and they forget their own names, and then there is the fact their blood is more nutritious. Pushes the venom right out of my system. For about a week.”

Rieka’s body stilled, her body immobile as if she were being….But he hadn’t even attempted to perform bloodwork. Even in this place, I can feel its effects. Which meant one thing. He did not fear her.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked as my grandfather continued to stare at her with a gaze unlike any I’d ever seen from him. It was dark, and cruel, and cold.

He took a casual step towards her. “Clever little T'eiryash. Who knows, perhaps your blood will be the miracle cure I’m after?”

She lifted her chin. “Then answer me one question?”

“Only if you answer one of mine.”

Body still motionless, Rieka nodded and asked her question. “How long have you known about the codes?”

His brow rose in amusement. “Longer than before there were codes to be known. Kensilla was quite tech-savvy even when it was a monarchy. And the royal family did love their personal security to be—personal. Even if someone did manage to read the code, it was pure hubris on The Core’s part for thinking no one would work out what was right in front of their faces.”

“ An Imaris must always be on the train ,” her inner voice mused in my grandfather’s head.

“Why haven’t you used it?”

He tutted. “That’s two questions, but I’ll indulge you. I was going to use the code. I had intended on using it on Rhydian as well but then the boy went and broke an oath. So I’ve no choice but to abandon him to his fate.”

My own chest constricted at his words.

“And the train passengers, what happens to them with Rhydian here and you gone?”

My grandfather chuckled. “Exactly what you think.”

In the physical world, my fury roiled under my skin.

Kosha took another step towards Rieka, craning his bare neck. “Now your turn. Tell me why you came here this morning. What did you think you could accomplish.”

“I came to stop a predator.”

Her words made him laugh. “A predator. You are as much a predator as I am Rieka. You reek of blood.” His face twisted into a mocking smile.

Her face was impassive, but her tone was solemn. “I know I am a monster, the difference is I only kill other monsters.”

“You did.” He took another step closer, staring down his nose at her. “Farewell Rieka. Thank you for the time you gave to my grandson. It was wonderful to see him smiling again.”

I felt the rush of his bloodwork. A moment later the blade was in his chest where an echo of that pain throbbed in my own.

At the exact moment he had attempted to attack her, Rieka had pulled her dagger from the sheath in her boot and plunged it into his chest. She kept her hand there and pushed. And kept pushing until his back collided with the stone wall of the temple.

His heartbeat thumped loudly in my ears. “How?”

With her free hand, I watched as she pulled a leather tie from around her neck revealing the crimson shard I had given her.

“One hears rumours when being hunted by gods. Like Bloodhounds don’t need your blood to harm you, but they can’t do anything to you if you have theirs. I just never expected it to be true. Nor for your grandson to give it to me willingly.”

She tucked the shard back into her shirt and released the blade, then stood and watched.

The last thing my grandfather saw when he died was Rieka, with tears streaking down her face.

“Bury him on the hill,” was the first thing I said when I pulled myself from my grandfather’s memory.

I knew it was fruitless to ask where Rieka was. She was gone.

As I climbed the stairs back to my room, Wade, Jonah and Taren followed close behind, desperate to get answers out of me about what I’d seen.

I wondered if her bunkmates know. Did she tell them about her suspicions about my grandfather? Did she tell them about her plans to leave? Do they know the truth about us? I need to know.

I needed to know everything. Only then…a pathetic laugh escaped me.

No, perhaps not even then would I be able to forget her, forgive her for making me love her and then abandoning me.

I slammed the door closed behind me sealing by friends and the Kanahari out of my bedchamber. Every movement hurt. A new cut had been strewn across the inside of my forearm because of the Bloodwork I’d performed. I knelt on the ground behind my desk and the one on my thigh split open, soaking my pant leg red. I tired to ignore the pain as I pulled open the third drawer.

The sketch of the buyer was missing. Perhaps that was what she meant. Perhaps she thought she could make trade with that god, her freedom in exchange for something of value?

But the only thing of value she had was herself and she’d fought for her freedom too hard to give it up. Unless…unless she thought the Resistance was of value to him.

The thought was too reprehensible. I didn’t want to think her capable—but she had left me. Could she really do that? And even if she could betray us that way, would she want to put herself in the hands of a god again, especially the one that she thought she killed?

I set the thought aside and reached into the back of the drawer and found the envelope I’d stored there. I ripped it open and tipped the item out into my hand.

The arrowhead glinted under the luminos of the room’s lamps. The blood had stained the barbs, making the crystalline there a horrible grizzly red.

I glanced over at my bed and the fresh linen. Someone had changed it in my absence.

This was most definitely a bad idea. I had a day at most before I had to return to the train, and it was a risk given the state of my body. I could very well die doing this. But I had to know why.

Climbing onto the covers, I took a deep breath, lay down, and then touched the arrow tip to my tongue.

Pain ripped through my shoulder and for a moment, I had to remind myself it wasn’t my shoulder. Even if it felt like it was.

I pulled myself from her thoughts until I could feel myself once more. Until I was the observer.

I watched as the world around me was reconstructed from Rieka’s memories, from what the mind and not the eyes were aware of.

She clutched her injured arm to her chest and crawled across the stone floor of the Deadwood station before she shielded herself with the aged alcove wall.

This was not what I came for. I sought out the thread. The long sinuous crimson membranes that lead from one memory to the next spread out over the memory like a spider web, the paths between them a maze to the untrained Hemopath. One could easily get lost without an anchor.

I removed my hairpin. Though it wasn’t real in this realm, it had always served me well and led me home. I walked over to the wall where Rieka was, and I wedged the blade into a crevice in the wall above her.

The iridescent silver thread which I knew to be mine, shimmered in and then out of existence as it anchored me to my mother’s blade.

I returned to the crimson threads, Rieka’s presence pulsating within them. When I touched the nearest thread, flashes of where they lead filled my head and I kept plucking until I found the one that had led her here, to this station.

I took hold of it and felt the world shift.

A forest rose up before me, dark and loud. Every part of my body was terrified. And a little excited.

They were her emotions.

Ahead of me, standing right on the edge of the forest, was a small girl.

Rieka.

She couldn’t have been older than eight, perhaps younger. Her dark hair fell in two braids on either side of her head, and they swung as she came to an abrupt stop, staring at something in the grass.

A high-pitched growl pierced the air.

I moved closer and saw a small grey wolf a few meters in front of her. It moved to pounce on her, but its thin wiry legs were too weak to carry it and it collapsed into the grass. Fearlessly, Rieka approached the sickly wolf pup, picked it up like it were a stray kitten and said, “You are going to live. I’m going to be a Celestial General one day, and I need a guard. You can be it. I order you to live.”

As she departed the clearing, heading in the direction of hazy blue lights, the scene shifted as the thread I held pulled me into another memory.

Comfort and safety were the first emotions I felt when the memory settled. We were in a square courtyard at the centre of a terraced house. The scent of blessed, steel and leather coated the air. This was the Burrough she spoke of. The home for the Deogn military personnel.

Rieka was older here. Sixteen perhaps, her black hair unrestrained down her back. She brandished a wooden sword, swinging it and striking at the one held by an older gentleman with dark curls.

This was her father. And because she knew his name. I knew his name.

Anton Nicora. A captain of the City Watch.

There was a cry of pain and Anton clutched his chest. Rieka had struck her father, jabbing him with her wooden sword.

She struck him again, and he fell to his knees. “Pierced through the heart by my own daughter’s hand.”

Rieka ran at her father, laughing as she jumped into this embrace.

A door opened somewhere in the house, and a moment later a woman screamed in joy from inside drawing Rieka’s attention. Another moment passed and a young man, a few years older than Rieka entered the courtyard.

He was handsome, and tall, with dark black waves to his shoulders. A younger version of Anton. A brother.

Rieka has a brother.

His face bore the painted pesai of one of the warrior castes of Deos.

“You made it?” she asked in anticipation, her knuckles on the sword pommel turning white as she awaited his answer.

The young man paused as long as he could before his sister was ready to burst. A familiar smile, a matching smile to the one I’d so rarely seen on her face appeared. “I did. Highest score in ten years.”

She squealed in joy when she jumped from her father’s arms, the sword she held filling the air with dust when it hit the dirt. Rieka threw herself into her brother’s embrace. “Orion!” she cried. “I knew it. I just knew you would make it.”

“Highest score,” their father questioned. “That means—”

“Citadel Watch.” Orion nodded. “I’ll get to be present for the cycle. Watch the Ascension in person.”

“Oh Orion,” Rieka sighed in awe. “How wondrous.”

The memory faded once more.

I felt her joy first before I saw the outline of the city as she spun in the street. Brick and stone, shadowed by the blue glow of the glass encasing the luminos powered lights that lined the streets of the Burrough.

“Daughter, hush,” a tall blonde woman in a silver-painted pesai warned with a smile. “People will report us.”

Barely older than the last memory, Rieka sang flatly at the top of her lungs in celebration.

“Oh Mama, who would be so callous as to report us on such a momentous day,” Rieka said, continuing to twirl until she reached the top of the steps of the nearest house. I followed them in and felt her shock when she found her brother sitting in the dark of their kitchen, a bottle of alcohol in his hand.

“Orion, what are you doing back so early?” their mother asked, closing the door to the cold night air, silencing the celebrations outside.

“I was released from duty early,” he replied nonchalantly.

“Is that good?” Rieka moved around the table to see her brother’s face. It was not the face of a man who’d formerly been elated with his new position.

Orion didn’t answer. Instead, he wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt and leaned forward to run the ribbon in Rieka’s hair through his fingers. “Tell me sister, what did you get up to at the festival, tell me what I missed?”

The heat of the Solstice sun blazed out across the lake. Citizens regaling in her light picnicked by the shore and bathed in the waters.

The dream told me this was a treat for Rieka. A sign from The Celestials that this Ascension Cycle would be prosperous.

Her family had found a place to relax under a tree by the shore, the tree’s canopy serving as the perfect shade from the sun.

Rieka’s father lay asleep on the picnic blanket softly snoring, his arm across his eyes shielding them.

Her mother, Malori, sat before her, the thin gossamer robe she liked to wear during the summer months softly billowing in the wind. Through the material of her robe, I could see the clean lines of Organically removed wings. The marks of her Sundering.

Not at all the way Rieka had suggested—that she herself had been the cause.

Rieka raised a hand and touched her mother’s back. “Do you regret it?”

Her mother looked over her shoulder at Rieka, her blond hair spilling down her back. Through the sheer pesai that shrouded her dark brown eyes, she regarded her daughter fondly.

“The loss of my wings, the pain was unimaginable.”

“Do you not wish you had been selected for your cycle?” Rieka asked curiously.

Her mother signed. “At the time, yes. I wanted nothing more than to be one of The Chosen. But when I wasn’t, I committed to my Sundering. And if it had not been for that choice—” Her mother leaned forward and touched her forehead to Rieka’s, a matching pesai upon her face—“I would not have met your father.”

Rieka’s father snored loudly as he rolled over on the picnic blanket, causing both women to giggle.

“I miss flying every day. But it pales in comparison to how much I miss him when he is gone.”

Rieka shifted on the blanket and leaned into her mother, who draped a gentle arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

“Celestial favour prevents descent into The Dark Sphere. The Celestials did not find me worthy then. I have done everything in my power to prove my worth now. All I can do is hope I have done enough that they don’t bequeath my soul to Veliah.”

“Would you miss me if I was one of the chosen?” Rieka asked, lamenting, “We would never see each other again.”

Her mother stroked her dark hair as she answered, the scent of love flowing from mother to daughter. “To ascend and join the Celestials in the God Sphere is the greatest reward for our devotion, but one few ever receive. I would be proud for you to be chosen. But yes daughter. I would miss you immensely.”

The thread pulsed in my grasp and pulled me forward, closer to the present.

The white walls around us glimmered and shone under the glare of the morning sun that crested through the open roof. Gargantuan statues lined the entry, their presence as striking as the golden masks they wore.

We must be in the Deogn Citadel. I’d seen it depicted in art work before, but they couldn’t do it justice. It was so vast, so cavernous, one was likely to get lost in the glistening halls.

I tightened my grip on the thread and felt myself drawn to a line of worshipers that stretched further than even her memories could see. It snaked out of the Citadel and back in, leading to a dais of some kind at the centre where worshipers were paying tribute. Every single person who entered, regardless of caste, wore a pesai, the traditional eyeshield of a follower of Celestisum. Some were painted, others cloth or lace. The one Rieka wore was a lovely sheer lilac.

She had to be near twenty. Behind her, dressed similarly in Deogn robes was her mother.

“Are you sure you remember the Tenants of Ascension,” Malori whispered.

From what I recalled, Ascension occurred once a year in Deos when the Ecclesiarchy selected from among the Devolved Human population the most devoted worshipers to join the Celestials in the God's Sphere.

Why has the thread led here?

“Of course, Mother,” Rieka hastily responded as she moved up the dais stairs where she then preceded to speak to herself, the words a tenant of some kind. “My soul is not my own. It is a gift. To treat it unkindly is to dishonour the gods who granted it. Celestial favour prevents descent.”

I felt her nervousness as she approached the figure sitting atop the glass throne situated in the centre of the dais. Black robes draped over a female body. Long red hair peaked out of a black sheer veil, whilst a gold mask reminiscent of chainmail shielded from view the upper portion of the woman’s face.

Rieka closed the distance between them. She lowered herself until her head touched the stone of the dais floor before speaking. “May the Treasured One shine bright, may their words be headed and may my own words find welcome ears.”

The crimson-garbed priest at the corner of the dais invited Rieka to stand.

Rieka offered the basket in her hands to the opposite priest. “Goods tended with my own hands, gifted to The Servitors, so that their stomachs may be full in the performance of their duties.”

The first priest, his eyes covered by a gold pesai of his own, spoke again in a kindly tone. “You may now ask for guidance, and the Treasured One will deliver your words to The Celestials.”

Her nerves intensified. “I seek nothing for myself Treasured One. Only that I may be given the strength to do as my mother had. Should I fail to be selected for Ascension, may the gods grant me the strength to Sunder myself.”

Her words confused me. Had she not been the cause of her mother’s sundering?

I hadn’t long to linger on the thought. Rieka bid her farewell to the Voice of the Gods and began her departure from the dais when the young woman behind the mask chose to speak.

“Odelle Nicora.”

The memory faded into another.

Rieka sat on a stool in a small room, the walls draped in cloth with the Northern Constellation emblazoned on it, the symbol of the Celestial Servitors.

She was alone save for the ghostly image of a wolf lying on the floor. Were these the spectrals she’d spoken of? The language she’d once used to speak to her wolf before he’d been killed?

The door behind her opened and a young woman walked into the room. Mousy brown hair and a plain face, she couldn’t have been any older than Rieka. The robes she wore indicated her position as a Novitiate Priestess of the Celestial Servitors.

She busied herself about the room for a moment before stopping before Rieka and speaking. “My name is Novice Vesia, and I will be your guide throughout your cycle until Ascension. I will show you to your new accommodations, look after your health and your diet, provide you with an exercise regime to improve blood circulation and be your escort throughout the Citadel grounds. Do you have any questions for me Chosen One Odelle Nycora?”

“My family?”

Novice Vesia nodded, stepped away from Rieka and walked over to a table by the wall. When she returned, she presented Rieka with a long narrow box, the lid open. Inside was a crimson eyeshield. The memory told me it was silk, the pattern so intricate, so delicate, the material so fine, that it could only have been fabricated by a master Spindle. “Your parents and your brother have each been presented with their own pesai. Each one made right here in the Citadel, a gift from the Servitors in celebration of their rise to Devout Caste.”

“May I?” the young priestess said as she pulled the eyeshield from the box and prepared to fasten it around Rieka’s head.

As the thread on the memory pulled taut, ready to snap me to another, my own thoughts lingered on the fact they had addressed Rieka by a different name.

Orion and Rieka stood face to face in the kitchen of their home. An expression of relief on his face. “Truly Del?”

Rieka smiled up at him. Her brother was a good head taller than her, his hair darker than her own. “Yes. I thought about what you said, and the thought of never doing the things I love again, seeing the people I love again, leaving you all behind. I can’t do it. So yes, I’ll leave with you. I’ve always wanted to see Prea.”

“Oh sister!” He swept her into his arms in a fit of joyous laughter. “We can travel to the Wild Isles if you want to.”

“Just don’t mention it to Mother and Papa,” she said when he finally let her feet touch the stone floor once more. “I don’t want you and him fighting about me again.”

As Orion once more swept his sister into his arms, another thread pulsed and I pulled on it.

It was dark, the night sky littered with the light of the souls gifted a place in The God Sphere.

Rieka stood on a hill, the cloak she wore warm against the chill of the harvest season air. She was staring off down the hill, to the docks where another hooded figure stood, waiting by the ramp to board a ship with the head of a dog on its flag.

“Forgive me, brother,” she spoke in her own mind. “But Mother is right. Celestial favour prevents descent. I will not condemn my soul to Veliah. You may be fine with abandoning your post, but I haven’t the stomach for it. I will watch over you from The God Sphere. I swear it on my soul.”

And she waited until the tall, hooded figure on the docks boarded the ship. Alone.

She turned to leave just as I was pulled into the next memory.